Can the iPhone 4S really hit the download speeds Apple advertised?

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As we sift through the information we’ve gleaned from yesterday’s iPhone 4S announcement, one of the details that left a little bit of fuzziness was in the advertised download speeds that Apple boasted. Specifically, they displayed a slide that shows impressive download speeds that rival those of 4G Android phones. Unfortunately, this was somewhat deceptive, as there was some important information that was left out of this talking point: you aren’t likely to have any chance of attaining those speeds.

As you can see above, the mentioned slide reads “maximum speeds (HSDPA),” and shows the iPhone 4S pulling in 14.4Mbps on the downstream. To the casual observer, it looks like the iPhone will deliver speeds that rival those of the Atrix 4G, the Thrill 4G, or the Sensation 4G. And to the casual observer this might also seem to be true on all three nationwide US carriers: Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T.

Phil Schiller added “This is what our competitors call 4G… the iPhone 4S is just as fast as all of these phones, even faster in real-world use.” The only problem with that statement is that it’s not always true.

What’s really going on here is that one protocol of the world iPhone 4S has theoretical speeds of up to 14.4Mbps. AT&T is the only iPhone 4S US carrier that supports HSDPA (note that all three Android phones above as GSM devices on AT&T’s network). And, as we know from mobile network testing, AT&T’s HSDPA isn’t nearly mature enough to support that in real-world conditions.

The bigger point is that that not all iPhone 4S owners will get these speeds that rival those Android phones, but only because not everyone is on AT&T. The iPhone 4S is theoretically just as fast as the Atrix 4G but only if it’s not held back by an EVDO Rev. A network.

As the speeds that the keynote slide told us to expect aren’t even close to being the norm, this was actually a pretty deceptive part of the keynote. Was it a lie? Of course not. But it was some rhetoric on Apple’s part, and by now we’ve all learned not to confuse theoretical speeds with real-world transfer speeds.